A Salutary Shot of So-So Mozart
INWARD SOUND | 1.31.21
Asked what makes a successful album, Mick Jagger once said: “Two tracks of hit, eight tracks of shit.” Since their founding in 1962, the Rolling Stones have produced an impressive amount of hits. They’ve also produced a lot of, well, fertilizer.
On Mozart’s birthday last Wednesday, Deutsche Grammophon released a recording of a never-before-heard composition by him, written when he was 17. The manuscript of this Allegro in D for piano wasn’t totally unknown, having popped up at antiquarian dealers and auctions since the 1800s.
But it had never been heard before. In a video trailer, the tenor Rolando Villazón called the world premiere an “extraordinary moment.” Do you have a minute to spare? If so you can capture that moment right here.
It really is that brief: 94 seconds of music. But according to Villazón, even 94 seconds of unheard teenage Mozart can reveal to us a new “musical and artistic cosmos.”
Not to be a curmudgeon, but I’ve listened to the Allegro a bunch of times and I’m getting more humus than cosmos. It’s charming, for sure, with a puppy dog eagerness right off the start and these cute firefly winks as the theme repeats, ornamented with chirpy grace notes.
So Mozart, yes. But hit Mozart? Release-as-a-single Mozart?
And yet the itty-bitty Allegro really can be a gift. Not because it delivers a pure jolt of genius from beyond the grave. But because in its okay-ness and definitely-not-terribleness it bears witness to practice. To trying things out on the page. To getting a so-so idea out of your system so that the channel doesn’t clog up and better things can follow.
My friend the jazz pianist Dan Tepfer says that “getting better at music — or at anything, really — is not about making your best better but about making your worst better.”
Part of that means intentionally addressing weaknesses. But above all it’s about keeping at it. Creating things that are not perfect. Putting things out there not despite the risk that they’ll be shit, but because the doozies are prime fertilizer for the good stuff to grow on.
BONUS
If you have more than a minute, here is a preposterously great performance of a spectacularly uneven Mozart opera, “La Finta Giardiniera,” written when he was 18. There are ho-hum stretches and moments that are astonishingly dramatic and beautiful. The proportions may not quite conform to Mick Jagger’s ratio, but you can hear young Wolfgang getting there.
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Photo: Chris Reyem on Unsplash